Last words from Bowra
Christopher Gill
Horner C. M. Bowra (Duckworth E2.95) How good was Maurice Bowra? The personal qualities of wit and friendship, his value as a symbol of broad and humane learning at Oxford—these things memories and memoirs record. But since his death last year deprived us of the man, we are left with the books, and their attributes. This book on Homer was his last. At his death, nine of the ten intended chapters were complete, and Lloyd-Jones has pre pared them for the printer, It was written for a series, "Classical Life and Letters ", which aims to give introductory works for the general reader as well as the undergraduate, but whose authors are experts, their contributions of interest to specialists. Bowra's ability to present the complex simply, his clarity (unaffected by old age) make his introduction to Homer highly accessible. A reader who turned from, say, the Penguin translations to this book would learn much of what scholars think about the poems. He would be lucidly informed of the relationship between the heroic world depicted in the Iliad and Odyssey and the historical reality archaeology uncovers. He would learn how the poet perpetuates in his own time the aristocratic values of the semi-legendary society he presents. He would receive a full, if somewhat mechanical, account of the characteristics of epic style, ranging from individual words to the structure of a whole poem. But I doubt that he would end up by feeling that the poems were really more interesting or significant than he had before, that there was a singular literary phenomenon here to understand. This is a reaction a good introductory work can (and in the case of Homer should) induce. The absence of this response does not stem from features peculiar to this book; it is a result of Bowra's whole scholarly approach.
What Bowra lacks is a sense of the problematic. The exposition marches on, confidently ordered, secure of meeting with general acceptance. But we miss any sensitivity to the interstices of his argument, to the gaps in conventional explanation, from which (when they are dealt with) a strikingly new perspective may emerge. Homeric studies were profoundly altered in the 'thirties by an American, Milman Parry, who set out to show, what most people now accept, that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed without the use of writing, by formulaic techniques similar to those still used in Yugoslav oral poetry. The epic bard was not a solitary, writing in a vacuum, but a singer, sharing vocabulary, themes and plots with teachers and contemporaries. The technical implications of this theory—the mechanics of oral composing — have largely been worked out. What we still do not understand is the individuality of a poet who shared so much that was common to a tradition, who "Homer ", in this sense, is. We are ignorant too of the aesthetic of oral poetry, the values Homeric listeners specially prized. Bowra, who combined scholarly experience of epic poems with a literary sensibility, might have addressed himself to these questions with valuable results. But he does not isolate them as problems; his smooth discussion treats them en passant. He presents the singer, as he sings, choosing not only a major story like the Iliad, but skilfully selecting or blending variants of episodes (like Achilles's vengeance on Hector). This is interesting; but he does not pursue the question to individual manipu lation of the epic language. And his rather conventional critical terms (" details which enliven the narrative ", "thrilling climax") clo little to formulate any special aesthetic for pre-literate epic, The fact is that in 1970, as in 1930, Bowra knew all the scholarly debate about t'he peculiarity of the Homeric epics; indeed, he began the later book with a description of oral composition. But he still wanted, essentially, to criticise the poems as the first great works of literature, as though they were products of literate culture. In this process, the unique features of the epics, their strange ness, get lost or papered over. Bowra's was a mind in a hurry. His swift articulateness (he must have been the perfect examinee) and 'his bland, graspable style—curiously uncharacterised for a man famous as a verbal wit—work best when there is a big job to be done; as in Heroic Poetry, where he converted a vast subject matter into lucid categories. But when, as in Homer, the task is not to make the confusing clear but to highlight the singularity of the relatively well known, we look for nuance, individuality, even intellectual risk —and these things Bowra has not given us.
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